Composing From The Orphan Tongue: Linguistic Politics, Trauma, And Third Space In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Abstract

This article looks at how Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous deals with the politics of language and trauma amid the abrasion between English and Vietnamese, pain and survival, and personal and colonial histories. This article posits that Vuong’s novel performs resistant writing, foregrounding the “orphaned” mother tongue and activating this language as a cultural inheritance site. Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theory of the third space, Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualisation of the subaltern voice, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s notion of language as cultural memory, and Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, the analysis demonstrates that the novel constructs a hybrid discursive space where suppressed identities and silenced histories can be articulated. Vuong illustrates the disruptions of migration, the ruptures of war, the weight of generational trauma, and the hybridity of diasporic selfhood through Little Dog’s epistolary letter to his illiterate mother—a letter that itself embodies the impossibility of direct communication in a fractured linguistic and emotional landscape. As theoretical and textual analysis reveal, linguistic hybridity in the novel becomes both a strategy of survival and a mode of subversion, carving out space for subaltern and traumatised voices to speak, resist, and endure.